Inauguration

I HAVEN'T WRITTEN on this blog for a long time, because I've been busy finishing my book on chickens. I thought I HAD finished it : only the introduction and conclusion were left to write when the semester started, and I've started back to work on my next project, giving a talk at the ASBH on graphic narrative, illness and disability.

HOWEVER: I know now that I need to contribute one final chapter to my book, Auguries, Biology, Culture: Notes toward an ABC of Chickens. The chapters that exist so far are: "Auguries", "Biology", "Culture", "Disability", "Epidemic", "Fellow-Feeling", "Gender", and "Hybridity", and I'd been planning to end there, with just a final chapter, "The Zen of the Hen," to get the concluding Z in there. I still think I will write that chapter, which will be on "just sitting" among other things, but first I need to write one final chapter, "Inauguration." Why, you might ask, other than the fact that like everyone else in the world (it sometimes seems) I've been obsessed with the campaign to elect OBAMA, and am now in that zombie-like-zone after the election that the Onion satirized so well?

ALL ALONG I've been thinking that this campaign has seemed to have endowed chickens with more than the usual amount of political significance. I've seen stories on Jeremiah Wright titled "Obama's Chickens Come Home To Roost," noticed the sudden proliferation of "Why did the chickens cross the road?" jokes that featured John McCain and Sarah Palin, been appalled by those "OBama Bucks" created by the racist southern California volunteer (was she a staffer of the RNC or merely a local party stalwart) that featured fried chicken and watermelon on a "food stamp" dollar with Obama's picture on it. But this morning when I checked my RSS feed I found three stories that have pushed me over the edge, and forced me to contemplate yet one final chapter.

FIRST, THERE WAS THIS STORY filed on "Political Punch," the blog of ABC News Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper, on October 31, 2008, at 9:49 pm.
(See http://blogs.abcnews.com/politiclpunch/2008/10/house-gop-leade.html ) Pulled by Tapper from the student newspaper of Miami University of Ohio (bless their neophytic journalistic chops!) was the report that House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio had called Senator Obama "chickenshit" for voting "present" on house votes. As Boehner put it, "In Congress, we have a red button, a green button and a yellow button, alright? . . . Green means 'yes,' red means 'no,' and yellow means you're a chicken****. And the last thing we need in the White House, in the oval office, behind that big desk, is some chicken who wants to push this yellow button." As a student present in the audience, Sophomore Laura Heins, put it, "To hear this man call this man a chickens*** in front of an audience was absolutely appalling. . . . . It angered me that he would go that low in order to promote his own candidate."

NOT ALL READERS of the blog found the "chickens***" label appalling, however. As one irate respondent put it, "Obama is a chicken and it is about time that more and more of his colleagues called him out on not voting as a State Senator or a US Senator . . . . What is he going to do as Commander-in-Chief? Play chicken . . . when the going gets tough?????" And as another reader put it, "Obama is a chicken. He is like the wimpy bully that pushes people around as long as his buddies are standing behind him. His campaign is built on lies and intimidation." A third reader returned to a familiar folk saying when he concluded, "Our chickens are coming to roost. Mr. Wright has called Mr. Obama a liar. Mr. Obama in return disowns Mr. Wright only after Mr. Wright suggested that Mr. Obama is a liar. Mr. Obama is a serial liar." And a final reader, "Clintonites for McCain," cautioned, "Chicken is a big word. My only concern about Obama is that he seems to stand (I am not saying hangs out with) a lot of punks--like Rev. Wright, Ayers, Kahlidi."

TO CALL SOMEONE A CHICKEN is, as that reader points out, "a big word." The term has been an insult since Diogenes responded with the gift of a plucked chicken to Plato's definition of man as a "featherless biped." The wordless gift said it all: human dignity could not support being compared to a chicken. It was crucial to differentiate between person and poultry. Thus rebuked, Plato added to his definition the additional stipulation: "Having broad nails." (The rejoinder is almost a gag line, for the insignificance of the stipulated detail suggests that in every other way the two life forms are as close as twins . . . )

BUT NOTE THAT Obama isn't just called a chicken, and thus by implication accused of cowardice and avoidance. He is also linked explicitly to the color yellow, which extends the connection to cowardice while broadening this to a racial slur against all people of color. (Suzanne Langer has a great rereading of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" that makes this point, for anyone who is sceptical.) And such racism explains the image of Obama as a wimp who rules by intimidation, the fear that the "chickens" will "come to roost," revealing Obama's buddies to be not only Jeremiah Wright, but also William Ayers and Rashid Kahlidi (seemingly "bullies" for their advocacy of the rights of people of color at home and abroad). Finally, Obama is described as chickenshit, an excremental curse that compactly conveys not only abjection, but powerlessness, insignificance, impotence, and even backwater rurality.

AS I WAS PONDERING THESE POSTS, I FOUND THE FOLLOWING, from "John Kelly's Commons," a blog at WashingtonPost.com:

Inaugural Balls: For the Birds?

"The upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama allows us to have a quick lesson in Roman history. Though its precise etymology is disputed, "inauguration" is generally believed to come from the Latin for "directing the birds."

Birds were very important to the Romans for foretelling the future and discerning the moods of the gods: the way birds flew, what they ate, how they ate. (It was considered a good sign if food dropped from the beaks of the sacred chickens as they were fed. Yes, there were sacred chickens.) You still might say, after some mishap, "This doesn't augur well." Or, you might say that if you were, like me, kind of pretentious. To inaugurate means to prophesy about the future, something the Sunday morning pundits love doing.

Frankly, I know more about Roman augury than I do about American inaugurations. I think that's because inaugurations aren't really the province of the non-political native Washingtonian. They're for the party faithful, the monied supporter, the hopeful office-seeker.

Or are they? The balls might be tough to get into but anyone can watch the inaugural parade, right? Won't this particular inauguration draw all sorts of interest among natives and outlanders alike? [ . . . ] I haven't decided yet what I'm doing. I'll keep my eyes on the sky--and on the sacred chickens. What about you?"

KELLY'S FINAL COMMENT SAYS IT ALL. We still need to keep our eyes on the sky, and on the sacred chickens, in order to figure out what the future augurs. Or, as I argue in the first chapter of my book, "Auguries," the kinds of knowledge we can get from watching chickens are still a potent part of our cultural imagination. They've just expanded their prognostication potential, to include the realms of biology, culture, disability, medicine, economics, and yes, even politics.

CHICKENS CAN EVEN ILLUMINATE the strategies of Obama's transition team, or so this final article I found on my RSS feed suggested to me. Chickenmuseum.com posted this great advice for "Introducing the New Birds on the Block."

**

"Adding new breeds into your peaceful and comfortable neighborhood of chickens can put quite a rumble between the old and the new. Admit it, nobody likes newcomers. . . . . Fret not, for this kind of attitude and feud lasts only for a couple of days. . . . There are numerous peace-making strategies to help both parties adjust with each other. . . . .

"One very good strategy is to let them see each other without having any physical contact. How? If you have a run . . . you could put your old chickens there and then put a border (chicken wire) between the run and the coop. Put your new chickens inside the coop. This way, they are able to see each other minus the harm. Be sure that both parties have access to sufficient food and water. You can do this for about a week.

"As transition day comes, . . . you can now 'join' them in one arrea. You can transfer the newcomers to the resident flock's territory during the night when all the birds are sleeping. Upon waking up, the old chickens will notice the new ones and they will . . . try to start a fight but will not because they are too groggy to initiate it.

"Distraction techniques are always effective in some way. This can alleviate tactics of war coming from the resident chickens. . . .
"Some of the distracting techniques are:
a. Cabbage heads can do the trick. By hanging a piece of whole cabbage just above their head, chickens will reach it until everything is finished. That is, if they don't get exhausted by jumping to it and reaching it.
b. Make the pursuit an obstacle for the pursuing party. . . .
c. Let them run around at a wider and freer range. The oldies will be so thrilled . . . they wouldn't even notice that there are newcomers roaming around."

**

GEORGE W.'S HEAD has always seemed quite "cabbage-like" to me. But I don't think the Republican party needs him as a distraction technique. They already have Sarah Palin!

What a week to think about disability.

First I saw the stunningly awful "Removable Parts" with A. and S. The evening was appalling, excruciating, and ultimately (thankfully) fun. But the fun came only at the very end, during dinner, and even then was laced with frustration.

It wasn't fun to make our way through the remote hallways to the locked elevator leading to the impossibly steep ramp into the theater, where no acceptable spaces for wheelchairs awaited, so that S. and A. had to park themselves right in the front of the house, just to one side of the first row, at an uncomfortable position raised about a foot or so above the rest of the seats behind them. And it wasn't fun to watch the two performers--the singer and pianist--respond with discomfort to our stark presence right in front of them, as they performed a series of appalling song-and-dance routines about a psychological or psychiatric disorder resulting in self-mutilation that they persisted in characterizing as something other than a disability. It certainly wasn't fun to sit furious in the first row during the post-performance talk-back while the four members of cast and crew (all white and able, as far as I could tell) made the distinction between disability (which they viewed as certainly worthy of pity) and BIID, which was worthy of scorn, merely crazy and absurd. No acceptable choice, the one between pity and scorn! And while it was fun to take notes during the performance, in the excellently lit first row, getting many of the most disturbing lines from the performance close to verbatim to their evident discomfort, it was not fun trying to educate people so profoundly unaware of the multiple ways they were being offensive and cruel.

And no fun at all was the experience I had when the talk-back concluded. The audience had filed out. As A. , S. and I prepared to leave as well, the singer-songwriter-author of this dismal spectacle reached out and touched me on the arm, thanking me. He distinctly did not do the same to S. and A. It felt like a mark of complicity: you and I, it seemed to suggest, aren't like those two people in wheelchairs. We're both normal, and on the same side. I felt tainted and offended, for myself and for A. and S. Yet, tell the truth. During the performance in addition to being angry and appalled, I had also felt sympathy for the writer and pianist. I imagined their discomfort with us in the front row. I pitied them during the talkback, as we (even so gently) took issue with their ideas, and pointed out ways in which they should rethink the performance. Those emotions of pity and sympathy mark my liminal position in the whole encounter. Visibly able (though smarting inside at their scorn for those who struggle with psychiatric issues, as I have and do, and angry at their visible discomfort in the presence of my friends) I still experienced a kind of 'ability privilege' akin to white privilege. Simply by being seemingly intact, I earned the performer's sympathetic touch, acknowledging our kinship. A kinship I don't want, and don't feel.

Our dinner was much more fun, even though it didn't start out that way. Here we were at one of the four most accessible restaurants in NYC according to the NY Times (or could it have been one of the minimally accessible restaurants with the best food?) but the ramp had to be fetched (which took time) and required bracing before S. and A. could maneuver their chairs up it (with some frightening backslides and skids). Our dinner conversation was an uproarious relief as we trashed the performance and talk back, and the food was ample and delicious. But at the end of the meal there was still the difficulty of negotiating the trip to the bathroom next door (the small indignity of having to announce one's need to use the toilet, one of many such smaller and larger indignities) and then the trip up the broken pavement and inadequately curb-cut intersections of the West Village.

Tonight I went with M. and B. to see The 3:10 to Yuma, and found still more DS issues worth mulling over. The father in the film is a gimp--wounded in the Civil War where he fought for the North--and his missing leg is a plot point throughout the film. Shown first as cause for his son's disdain, then later as the reason he signs up for the impossible mission of bringing the criminal to the train to justice, the loss of his leg is finally invoked to express the incommensurability of disability and restitution. "I was paid the one hundred seventy five dollars and forty two cents not so I would leave the Army, but so they could leave me." Both men in the movie have been abandoned, in short: the soldier by the army which frags him and then deserts him; the criminal by his mother, who abandons him to a useless Bible. There's something going on here about a non-nurturant State and non-nurturing mothers: how both disable, the former physically and the latter morally. But I can't go farther into that question now: I've been writing about comic books, chronic disease management, and power all day, my legs ache after walking to and fro the Writer's Room, and my eyes are closing.

My wise chicken wonders what this has to do with the book I've promised her. It'll come. It'll come.